At 9:24 PM -0400 5/31/00, hsinclai wrote:
>Everything has been going perfectly for 2 weeks or so, every night the
>indexes are updated, new files are created, searches work (they find new
>material and reflect changes), and the errorlogs for the scripts are 0
>bytes, as should be (stderr is dumped out via 2&>1 >> myfile.somewhere).

Have you been timing the runs? How long does it usually take?

>Suddenly one night they don't run and htmerge spits out the message in the
>log file. The databases are gone, and only a .new file is in each
>directory.

What happens if you run this by hand now? Have you tried adding in
more debugging output?

>P700) and the disk I/O so fast, and the net connection is so fast that the
>second job might be starting before the first one finished. Or something
>like that.

Let me get this straight... You're running these as daily cron jobs,
right? If the cron job is really stepping on itself, you would expect
that it takes longer than 24 hours to run the job. Since you say this
is "sudden," was it taking anywhere *close* to 24 hours before?

My suggestion is to disable the cron job for now, run it by hand and
see what happens, how long it takes, etc. (This is pretty much
standard procedure for me when *any* cron job starts acting flaky.)